


Two weeks and seventy years

by halfeatenmoon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Torchwood
Genre: Comfort Sex, Get Back Together - After Presumed Dead, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-16 23:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16504652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: In 1943, Jack Harkness mourns the soldier he'd slept with the night before when he finds out that he was also Captain America and he'd just plunged into the ocean.In 2011, he almost passed out when he looked up at a news screen and saw him getting thawed out again.





	Two weeks and seventy years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



It started because Steve was in a London bar, desperate for a drink, and for a moment he thought he saw Bucky.

London was a strange place to be. [cut this sentence, work into the next one] He’d always heard it spoken about as one of the great cities of the world. He didn’t expect to get here when he tried to sign up, and travelling to London had never been a dream of his, but he always imagined it as, well, grander. It was a grim city right now, though, grey and smoky, its people full of fear and determination. Steve would much, much rather be in New York, except that grey and grim was exactly how he felt right now.

When their war room meeting finally broke for the night, Steve didn’t ask where to find a good bar. He didn’t want anyone deciding to come along, didn’t want to see Peggy looking concerned and having to try to convince her that it was just a nightcap, one drink and he’d turn in. He wasn’t that good a liar. And even in a foreign city, he knew how to find the kind of place he needed. Some things seemed to be the same the world over. He followed his gut through crooked alleys and dark corners, glarind down anyone who looked like trouble, until he found himself at a grubby basement pub that looked much too shady for good old Captain America.

He’d knocked back one drink sitting at the bar and was starting on a second when the man caught his eye. An Army man, but an American, in a familiar greatcoat and cap. Dark against the kakhi of Steve’s dress uniform. It wasn’t the sight of a fellow American in a London bar that made him stop and look, though. It was something about the way he held his shoulders, the jut of his chin, the way he threw his arm around a woman’s shoulder and the sound of his laugh. Before he could stop himself, Steve was reaching out, gripping the man’s shoulder. He needed it, needed to reach out and touch him and have him turn around with that familiar smile.

It wasn’t Bucky, of course. Steve had seen Bucky fall to his death just a few long days ago. It was another face altogether. But there was still something of Bucky in the way the man smiled.

“Well, hey there,” the stranger said. “Do I know you?”

“No, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“That’s a shame. I can get to know you, though. I wouldn’t mind buying you a drink.”

Steve glanced at the woman under his arm. “That’s very kind, but no, I wouldn’t want to interrupt.”

The man glanced at the woman, and they shared a smile before she winked at them both and slipped away.

“It’s my pleasure to be interrupted,” he said, and clapped Steve on the shoulder. “Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Captain Steve Rogers,” he replied, as Harkness shook is hand in a way that somehow managed to be more comforting that businesslike.

“Sorry I’m not the person you were looking for, Captain Rogers. I’m glad you could stop to share a drink with me, though. I think I can still be someone you wanted to find.”

Captain Harkness had eyes that promised mischief, and a smile that offered the kind of pleasures that Steve hadn’t dared to look for while he was serving. He was familiar for a different reason now; not the familiarity of Bucky’s mannerisms, but the gestures he knew from other men, the ones that he only wished he’d seen from Bucky. Steve had been too wary to flirt with guys since he’d been to the front. His position seemed so precarious, like he was only just technically a soldier, only just deserving of being there at all, that he didn’t dare look too long at his fellow soldiers. If any of them made a pass at him while he was in the field, he hadn’t been watching. He wouldn’t have even acknowledged it.

Here, though, in a dark underground bar with no officers, no witnesses in sight? Steve knew where he was headed. Bucky was gone, and tomorrow Captain America was launching off to face Red Skull in his lair. None of them could be sure what he would do, whether Steve would make it out alive. So why not turn in to the touch of a captain he had never met before, and never would again?

 

They drank, and exchanged stories carefully. Steve skipped his transformation and the Captain America title, talking vaguely about traveling with the USO shows, the leap from there to the field, a brief sketch of how he went rogue and rescued the prisoners. If Harkness recognized the outlines of Captain America in his tales, he didn’t mention it. He found other details to fixate on.

“The USO, huh? That must have been a hell of a time, with all those women.”

“They’re great girls. Very popular with the troops, too. Put a man on stage and they’ll start yelling for the girls back.”

“You spend much time with them backstage?”

He said it lightly, like a routine comment, and Steve took it as one.

“We talked sometimes. Once they tried to show me how to use make up.”

“Oh yeah?” Harkness smiled, slowly. “That sounds fun. I’ve worn makeup before, but I don’t have the best hand.”

“Me neither.” Steve’s heart was hammering; he couldn’t believe he sounded so cool. “If the girls hadn’t helped me then I would have made a mess of it.”

Jack had his elbow on the bar, his head cushioned on his fist, slowly sliding down so that Steve was looking down on him. Steve still wasn’t used to looking down on another man from a height. And never, ever like this.

“I bet they made you look real pretty.”

Steve didn’t break eye contact as he sipped at his drink. “You think I need makeup to look pretty?”

Harkness chuckled, a deep, suggestive sound. “I think you’re the prettiest thing in this bar.”

They could keep going like this all night if they wanted to. Steve had always enjoyed this part before, the slow feeling each other out, getting more and more bold before one of them made a practiced goodbye and left for the street - or the bathroom - and the other followed a careful interval behind. He could flirt for hours, in the old days, enjoying the warm build of familiarity and flattery and the thrill of it.

He could have that here, with Jack, just enjoying the slow, warm building of attraction and the increasingly clear promise of what was yet to come.

But he was going to fight tomorrow, and he had watched his friend fall, and suddenly nothing mattered so much as forgetting. Every moment that Jack was looking at him like that, too familiar and not quite right, just made him feel more and more desperate to forget. He raised an eyebrow, drained his glass and wished for the twentieth time that night that he could still feel it.

“I’m shipping out tomorrow,” Steve said, with a meaningful look at the door. “I think I’d better hit the hay.”

“Oh yeah? Where are you headed?” Jack asked. He handed Steve his coat, casual as anything, like he didn’t so clearly want to drape it over his shoulders as if Steve were his girl.

“Switzerland, I think. It’s… well, I have to fly out.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to be drunk behind the joystick.”

Jack was steering him towards the door now, his hand on Steve’s back. Paternalistic, Steve wondered, making sure he got home? Or was it possessive?

“You’re probably heading my way,” Jack said, and pushed him out the door. “We may as well walk together.”

 

 

Harkness was kind, that was the hardest thing. Steve had been after a rough fuck, the kind that made him forget who he was and where he was, that he had to be Captain America tomorrow. He didn’t want to feel tender towards this charming stranger; he didn’t want to feel anything at all.

It was impossible not to feel, though, the way Harkness held the back of his head like he was something precious. Steve had had a lot of people treat him like he was someone to protect, back when he was smaller. He’d hated it then. Nobody had held him like that since he became Captain America. People barely touched him at all when he was Captain America. His value was his strength.

He didn’t think he’d miss having people be gentle with him, or feeling vulnerable. But having a taste made him week with the sudden need for more of it, like he might crumble into Jack’s arms here in a soot-streaked London alleyway, with the relief of someone acting like they could take care of him.

“I could suck you,” he offered, gruffly, when they broke apart for breath. It was the safe option the one he should offer - no eye contact, no tender gestures, just the hard reality of cold cobblestones on his knees. The manly option. Saving face.

He was relieved when Jack kept hold of the back of his head and murmured, “Is that really what you want?”

So Captain Jack Harkness fucked him against the wall in an alleyway, and even with his chest against the wall and his head turned away, Steve couldn’t pretend this was nothing. He might be getting pounded so hard he could feel it in his teeth, the extra filthy feeling of fucking with their clothes still on and only their asses exposed to the night air, the knowledge that they were open for anyone walking down the alleyway to see. All things that some nights, might make this exciting. Except.

Except that Steve thought he craved debauchery, but what he really wanted to be loved, and while he’d only picked this guy out of a crowd because of who he looked like, he couldn’t have found a better soldier to hold him down and fuck him like he mattered.

 

 

The next morning, Steve boarded a plane. And then another one. And then steered it towards the Arctic.

Captain Jack Harkness wasn’t the first person he thought of as the engines cut out and he plunged downwards. He wasn’t the second, either. But in the moments before the crash, in between imagining a dance with Peggy and trying to picture Bucky’s smile, Steve remembered that he spent the last night of his life with a man who charmed him, held him like he mattered, and fucked him like he was something precious. He was sorry to leave Captain Harkness with another name to mourn.

 

 

Two days later, when Captain Harkness heard the news of another man he loved dead at war, he didn’t take the slightest bit of pleasure that the man he’d fucked that night turned out to be Captain America.

Seventy years later, still on his years-long bender after the loss of Torchwood Three, Jack Harkness looked up from the bar to see Captain Rogers’ face getting thawed from a block of ice and blurted out “That son of a bitch.”

 

 

Steve had been out of the ice for two weeks and he still no idea how to to handle it. Homesickness made him hunt for old, familiar things about the time he knew, but finding them made him queasy, the world alien but still familiar. On the other hand, taking in everything as though it was new, treating the future like a foreign country - it was too much, far more than his mind could handle. Mostly he tried to take it one day at a time, one small new thing at a time. 

Knowing it felt strange didn’t stop his eyes and his hands from reaching out towards familiar things, though. He stayed away from Brooklyn, but he dreamed about it. Every time he was up some high rise building for a meeting, he’d stare across the skyline towards the streets he used to know.

But he never even thought of looking up people. He knew that it might be someone he used to know who was still alive, that it wasn’t at all hopeless. There had to be so many, though. There had been seventy years gone by, and there had been a war. Bucky was gone, the Howling Commandos were probably gone, that gorgeous Captain who fucked him on his last night in the 1940s must be gone, too.

Then there was another day in a crowd, this time crossing a square in a New York park. It was the same confident stride, the same long coat, a moment of recognition and a pang of longing.

Twenty first century soldiers still look the same. And still attractive, he thought to himself, wryly. Then he saw the man’s face, and felt like time had stopped for a moment. Again.

He hadn’t for a moment thought that it oculd be Bucky, but it also didn’t even occur to him that it could be Captain Jack Harkness. He could be alive, still, one of the few soldiers who escaped death during the long days of the war, but if he was then he’d be nearly a hundred years old by now.

Yet there he was, the exact same face Steve had kissed two weeks ago, smiling like he recognized him.

“Excuse me, sir,” Steve said, carefully. “You look like someone I know. You didn’t have a relative who served in England in the forties, did you?”

“Captain Rogers,” the man said warmly. He clapped Steve on the shoulder and squeezed instead of letting go. “I don’t know whether to be flattered that you remembered me or insulted that you think I could be my own grandson.”

Steve gaped at him.

“Although I probably could become my own grandson, and it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve done.”

“Captain Harkness?”

“The very same,” he said, with a mock bow.

“Did they dig you out of the ice, too?”

“No, luckily for me - or not - I was awake for the last seventy years.”

Steve didn’t know which part of that to answer first. They were standing by a fountain in a normal New York park, mid morning, with joggers running past them and kids playing in the park, and Harkness was dropping things like that on him.

He eventually landed on “Sounds lucky to me. We won the war, didn’t we?”

“Ah, yes. Well, I wasn’t exactly fighting int eh war. Not the way you were, anyway. And there are plenty of problems other than war that can come up in seventy years.”

Steve thought of the people who must be gone from his life now, probably more people than he could imagine. That would make for plenty of sadness in seventy years. And yet, on its own, it didn’t seem like enough.

“I haven’t had time to catch up on the news,” he said, at last. “I guess it wasn’t all good.”

Jack laughed. “No, I’m afraid it wasn’t.”

Steve paused and looked around him again. The skyline wasn’t the one he’d grown up with, but it was the same place. He’d woken up one day and everything changed. He wondered what it looked like to see that whole process from start to finish.

“So if you were awake for the last seventy years, you must be nearly a hundred years old by now! So how are you so…” he gestured at the Captain’s general… everything.

Jack laughed. “Captain Rogers, I hate to break it to you, but I was nearly a hundred years old last time we met.”

“What? How?”

“I think we should get a drink before I try to explain that to you.”

Steve crossed his arms. “Try me.”

He’d expected Captain Harkness to put up more of a defense. Instead he just stared him in the eye and said “I used to be a time traveler, but someone accidentally made me immortal and got me stuck in one point in time.”

Steve stared at him. “Right.”

“See!” Jack slapped his shoulder again. “I knew you’d get it.”

“No, what really happened?”

“You don’t believe that?”

“You can’t be immortal.”

Jack smirked. “I looked you up, you know, after last time I saw you and I heard about the plane crash. Do you think what that doctor did to you is any less strange? Do you even know how long you’re going to live, or whether you’re going to age?”

“But…” Steve frowned. “But time travel…”

“Give it a minute to sink in. If you think that’s weird, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when you realize some of the people you’re working with.”

“Working with? I’m not working with anyone!”

“The people who put a twenty first century roof over your head, then.”

Jack put a hand on his back and started to walk them out of the square. “Come on, it’s time for that drink.”

“It’s ten thirty in the morning.”

“And you haven’t been to a bar since the forties either, I see,” Jack chuckled. “They’re open already, I promise.”

His hand was still in the small of Steve’s back. He liked it even more now than he had in the dim London pub, two weeks and seventy years ago.

 

 

Jack’s assumption was correct; Steve hadn’t been to a bar since he got defrosted. He had no reason to go to one alone unless he was going there to try to pick up, and doing that while he so visible seemed like… a problem. It was challenging enough to go out incognito in the forties, after he got big; now there was so much attention on him that it was impossible. Yet here he was, walking into a basement bar with an immortal Captain while he was still ignoring newspaper reporters every day.

“I don’t know if you’ve had much time to enjoy the fruits of this decade yet, but I can tell you the drinks are much better than anything we had during the war.”

They took seats at the bar, like they had last time, and Steve scanned the long row of taps. “What is all this?”

“Beer.”

“All of this is beer?”

Fortunately, Jack ordered a drink for him, another gentlemanly touch that made Steve feel simultaneously cared for and just a bit helpless. It was nice to have someone he could trust to show him around this decade, though.

Well. Someone who wasn’t a reporter or a member of a mysterious government agency, anyway.

“This is not beer,” Steve said, after a sip. He’d never even drunk that much beer before, and of course it would be better in the future, but he didn’t think it would taste alien. “I don’t know what this is, but it can’t be beer.”

“This is just the start. They make beers that smell like flowers and taste like chocolate. Next round, I’m getting you one of the ones that has all the alcohol content of a good whiskey.”

“Do you know I can’t actually get drunk?”

Jack snorted. “I've had species you can't even imagine tell me that old line, but everyone has their poison.”

“No, I mean it. It’s the rapid healing thing. It heals my brain cells as I drink. I really can’t get drunk.”

“So that whole time back in London, you were just acting?”

“Well,” Steve cocked his head and looked at Jack from under his eyelashes. “It wasn’t that hard to act like I was dazzled by something that night.”

Jack threw his head back and laughed. “Now there’s the Steve Rogers I remember. I knew you couldn’t be the squeaky clean boy they make you out to be on the news.”

“I didn’t decide to be that guy. It just happened. I agreed to it back in the war, but in the time I was out they really made me into something else.”

Jack leaned on the bar and watched him for a moment. “You know, there’s not much on Earth that I couldn’t imagine, but waking up and finding you’ve become a different kind of legend…”

Steve looked away. “When I said it was you, I thought you were the one person who might understand what it’s like.”

“You’ll get used to it. The future’s great.”

“I guess. Better food. Better beer, if you can call it that.” Steve stared down at his glass. “Is that supposed to be enough? Is that supposed to make up for the fact that everyone I loved is gone, now?”

Jack laughed - the kind of laugh that wasn’t really funny. “Yeah, I know that feeling. Me too.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. It still hurts, huh? I thought seventy years might be enough to move on and stop feeling it, but maybe it never gets easy.”

“Oh right. It… it does get easier, though, a bit at a time.”

“But you said...”

“New group of people,” Jack said, and knocked back a whiskey. “Moved on. New people. Lost them all, too.”

“I’m sorry.” He swallowed. “You’ll find more people to love, right? You’ll make new friends.”

“Oh, sure. I always do. But how are you finding it, making friends in the twenty first century?”

“I’ve only had two weeks,” he said, defensively.

“And have you talked to anyone for as long as you’ve talked to me?”

He tried to think of someone, but even his conversations with Nick Fury wouldn’t clock as much time as he had with Jack today.

“And why is it so easy to talk to you? Is it the time travel or the fact that you’ve lost people?”

“Maybe it’s because I’m just that cute,” Jack grinned.

“Don’t get too cocky, soldier.”

“I was never a soldier. I captained a spaceship.”

“I keep wanting to trust you, and then I find out it’s all been a lie!”

“Were you a real captain?”

“At least I was really in the Army. Maybe not promoted by the usual channels, but there was a war on.”

“Relax, Rogers. You’re the real deal. I’m not trying to claim that you’re a fake.”

“Well, I wasn’t then. I feel like one now.” Suddenly he was tired of this, the bar and the drinking during the day. The feeling that he was hiding from who he was really supposed to be, even though he didn’t know who that was and hadn’t the faintest idea how to find out.

“Maybe I haven’t been as helpful as I wanted to be today, but I can help. I understand it all better than your friends at SHIELD, anyway. So what can I do, Rogers? What do you want to know?”

He wanted to know how Jack Harkness knew about a government agency whose members had all told Steve that it was a closely guarded secret and he wasn’t to speak of it to anyone. Instead he asked, “How do you start over like this? How do you keep doing it, when you’ve lost everyone?”

Jack drummed his fingers on the bar for a moment. “The drinking isn’t working, is it?”

“Nope.”

“That’s okay.” Jack left a note on the bar and took Steve’s hand in his. “I have plenty of other ideas.”

“Should we go out like this?” Steve asked, nervously, his hand stiff in Jack’s.

“I won’t tell you it’s perfect, but the twenty first century isn’t like in your day.”

“I know, that was the most condescending part of the lecture they gave me on everything that’s changed,” Steve said, annoyed. They walked out the door and up the few steps back to the street, bathed in sunlight. Steve hung back from the bright sun on the street, still shaded by the awning of the bar. “So many people know my face, though.”

“And who’s going to dare have a go at Captain America for anything? They know you’ll punch them out the way you did Hitler.”

Steve rolled his eyes and felt his face go hot. “I don’t punch civilians.”

“Then I’ll punch them for you.”

Jack’s eyes were glittering with mischief. Steve’s instincts told him to stand tall and do the right thing, to stay out of trouble unless he was wading in to fight for justice. And every part of him also wanted to follow Jack into trouble just as far as he could, to see how much more trouble they could get into and how much fun it would be.

“Come on,” Jack said, softly, when he saw Steve hesitate. “There’s no Adolf to punch any more. Everyone knows you’re a hero. Even if it were something to hide, they’d never get away with kicking you out of the Army for it. And even if they did, who cares? Is that what you really want to be, with the past gone and the whole future behind you?”

Steve didn’t look at Jack. He didn’t say anything. But he took a breath and squeezed Jack’s hand, then stepped out into the sun.


End file.
